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Q And A Should Include The E

The IT world is cyclical for sure. I’ve seen trends and topics repeating themselves over and over again in my relatively short time here. I find it interesting that we keep solving similar problems over and over again. I also find it fascinating that this particular issue leads to the reason why blogs are so important.

Any Questions?

Questions abound in IT. It’s the nature of the industry. However, it’s not just new questions that we create when technology leaps past us. We keep asking the same questions over and over again. This is the field of study that created the FAQ, remember?

In recent memory, I find the same questions being asked over and over again:

What is SDN?

How can SDN help me?

What makes this different from what we’ve done before?

You’ve probably asked those very same questions. Perhaps you found the answers you were looking for. Perhaps you’re still trying to figure it out. The problem is that those questions are still being asked. The industry should have evolved to the point where the simple questions have been answered with simple answers. Complex questions, or those questions that need more in-depth discussion, should be treated as such. Yes, the question of what SDN really is would take more than a cursory paragraph on a blog, but we should be able to at least answer it with enough specificity to make the user not feel like they been slighted.

Questions will never stop coming in IT. But how should we handle them?

Any Answers?

Questions may abound in IT, but the answers drive IT. People make a career out of being the person with the answers. It’s in all the marketing jargon. It’s why we create blogs. Even though most of my writing in the last year has been focused on industry trends or non-technical focused posts, the top three posts on my blog are still answers to simple questions:

This would make it seem like people are in need of answers. Any blogger can look at the incoming search terms for their blog and see all the things that brought readers to them. People want answers and they will keep looking until they find them. But why?

Explain It

I never understood why people kept searching for answers until I thought about satisfaction. I think Randall Munroe summed up the satisfaction (or lack thereof) angle here:

Who are you, DenverCoder9?!? (Thanks XKCD)

People can find answers easily. But they won’t stop looking until they are satisfied with the answer. It’s easy to find people saying things like “That’s not supported” or “RTFM” when you’re looking for an answer to a particularly difficult problem. And if you’ve ever called a tech support line, you know how unfulfilling the unsupported answer can feel.

That’s when explanation comes into play for me. First, an admission: I’m a chronic explainer. If you’ve ever met me and had a conversation with me for more than three minutes, you know I explain things. I talk about comic books and movies and technical topics in more depth than I should. That’s because I want things explained to me. Explaining how OSPF area calculations are done is as important as explaining how Captain America ended up wielding Mjolnir.

Think about the following answers:

This is unsupported.

or

This is unsupported on that platform because the CPU doesn’t have enough horsepower to process the packets in real time. We tried cutting down on the processing time but it just overwhelmed the unit no matter how much we tried. So rather than dealing with poor performance, we marked it as unsupported.

Both answers are technically correct. But the second is much more satisfying because the explanation is there instead of just the distilled answer.

The IT world needs more explanation. We need to know why things work the way they do instead of just getting a response of a few words. The explanation has the keys to understanding the answer to the question in its totality. It prevents us from asking the same questions over and over again. It leaves us fulfilled and ready to seek out the next question that needs to be asked.

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3 thoughts on “Q And A Should Include The E”

When dealing with the tech support for the service you are using (hardware/software, etc) the standard of response is often at the level of “unsupported”. How do we the customer get the chain of support levels to pass down to the person we are dealing with the more satisfactory explanation? I know in my own role in supporting systems and services I will try and explain more thoroughly if/when I have that information available, however there is no guarantee that the next person in the chain will pass that information on or even consider it to be important. There might be many reasons behind both of these difficulties in communication, clearly there should be a better approach.

Bravo, you sir have gained one more devoted reader. I am a systems administrator that once used to work as customer support rep. A factor that has always remained constant in all these years is why the same question? it feels like we use half of our days resources addressing items that should have been understood years ago.
What has worked for me is drawings/diagrams and perhaps a few words and a footer reference to the more technical explanation.
Thanks for your time in writing this entry.